"fungus" news and stories

Should you prepare to buy your last bunch of bananas? According to a recent story in The New Yorker, the answer may be yes. The problem (which has also been deftly reported by writer Craig Canine, in Gourmet magazine and in an award-winning 2005 story for Smithsonian), is that growers have been relying on a single variety, the Cavendish and its genetic clones. What happens when you have a crop without genetic diversity? A disease, such as fungus Tropical Race Four, which is now running rampant, can take down an entire fruit. It wouldn't be the first time.

The Cavendish became popular with good reason: "They are the only variety that provides farmers with a high yield of palatable fruit that can endure overseas trips without ripening too quickly or bruising too easily," says New Yorker writer Mike Peed. Canine, who visited a Belgian lab that houses the world's largest collection of banana varieties, tasted some of the varieties that may one day replace the Cavendish, including the Yangambi Km5, which just so happens to be hundreds of years old. "When I tasted it, I imagined I was tasting the future," Canine wrote.

So will we be eating the Yangambi 5 on our Corn Flakes in a few years?

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Said to have aphrodisiac properties, this fragile species is suffering from drought on Southern European farms and will continue to suffer if predicted temperature increases come to fruition.

But as Southern farms are suffering, some Northern plantations are thriving from the increase in temperature (truffles are very sensitive to both frost and drought). But by the end of the century, scientists predict that in Toulose, France, temperatures will exceed 95 degrees F on 25-55 days out of the year (currently, it's only that hot about four days out of the year).

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In China, many products are produced at prices much lower than they are in other countries, but until recently, agriculture was not subject to the same type of mass industrialization. Now, it appears that China is muscling in on the truffle market, something that the French are not too happy about. France has a 45% share of the truffle market and their fungi cost an average of more than $500 per pound. Two new Chinese varieties of truffles cost more than 90% less - $28 per pound. The director of Yunri foods, a Chinese company that sells the truffles, said that they sell over 20 tons of truffles and mushrooms a year, mostly to the United States, United Kingdom and France.

A representative from the French Federation of Truffle Growers said that there were marked differences in the quality of the truffles, despite the fact that they look almost identical to the pricier Perigord variety. "It's a problem of aroma and of quality consistency." Truffle aficionados, predictably, state that the French version is unquestionably superior, but the real question is whether the average consumer would find the French truffles to be 90% better than the much less expensive Chinese ones.

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